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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

The idea feels out of date because optimism about the future is out of date. More people are willing to believe that humanity should go extinct than believe that humanity should colonize space. The author’s foil for Gerard O’Neill is none other than Rachel Carson, whose advocacy against pesticides has directly led to countless human deaths from otherwise-preventable diseases like malaria. Instead of someone like O’Neill who tries to figure out how humanity can grow and flourish throughout the solar system, our hero is the savior of the mosquito.

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What a completely bizarre opinion on Rachel Carson. How many deaths did she prevent by pointing out the health drawbacks of spraying the world in DDT and other non-specific chemicals dangerous to life?

https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry...

From- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

>A review article in The Lancet states, "research has shown that exposure to DDT at amounts that would be needed in malaria control might cause preterm birth and early weaning ... toxicological evidence shows endocrine-disrupting properties; human data also indicate possible disruption in semen quality, menstruation, gestational length, and duration of lactation."[38]

>Other studies document decreases in semen quality among men with high exposures (generally from IRS).[88]

>Studies are inconsistent on whether high blood DDT or DDE levels increase time to pregnancy.[65] In mothers with high DDE blood serum levels, daughters may have up to a 32% increase in the probability of conceiving, but increased DDT levels have been associated with a 16% decrease in one study.[89]

>Indirect exposure of mothers through workers directly in contact with DDT is associated with an increase in spontaneous abortions[87]

>Other studies found that DDT or DDE interfere with proper thyroid function in pregnancy and childhood.[65][90] Mothers with high levels of DDT circulating in their blood during pregnancy were found to be more likely to give birth to children who would go on to develop autism.[91][92]

There are other less toxic alternatives to DDT for mosquito control and Rachel Carson helped open our eyes to the fact that they are needed.

The slur against Carson is a myth that got started in the last couple of decades by anti-regulatory think tanks as a way to attack one of the foundations of the modern environmental movement. It's complete nonsense because 1) DDT spraying is still considered a legitimate method of mosquito (i.e. malaria) control, which was never the main problem anyway - widespread agricultural use was what led to "Silent Spring", and 2) DDT resistance eventually limited its effectiveness even for mosquito control. Read "Merchants of Doubt" if you want the gory details.

It's possible I was misinformed, then. I'll have to look into this.

The Nixon admin banned DDT in 1972. Just in the USA.

Somehow, this got translated into; 'Carson got DDT banned and all malaria deaths are her fault'. This is despite the fact that where there are mosquitos we are still using DDT.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/rachel_carsons_critics_keep_o...

It's the same logic as "If we don't use antibiotics in cattle they'll all die!". Totally ignoring the unintended consequences of antibiotic resistance in humans.

The old "this thing can't possibly work, even though it's done in other countries all over the world just fine" argument.

Props for the gracious response and openness to being mistaken. It always inspires me when I see this.

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this particular issue.

The funny/stupid/ironic thing is, the reasons people think humanity should just "go extinct" are all the reasons we should move to space instead. There's no story of "ecosystem damage" where there is no ecosystem in the first place.

Though based on my experiences on HN, even some people here need this really bashed into their heads, that we can't hurt ecosystems that don't exist. ("What if some do?" Then by all means worry about them, but by resources, they are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what the universe has.) There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people.

Yeah, the great thing about an O'Neill Cylinder is that the sooner people can move there, the sooner they can leave the Earth well enough alone. (Although in reality, I think the real challenge is going to be responsible stewardship of the Earth, not just "leaving it alone". Even the Amazon rainforest is likely an artifact of human culture.)

vastly underestimating the resources required to lift each kilogram into orbit, let alone the development cycle to get there. and shall we start all this now here on earth just adding to the plight I outlined just before?

again, no sense of proportion of the actual issue here. we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc.

establishing a space society is a hugely intensive operation that dwarfs the hundreds of millions required to put a few folks and some trinkets into a space station etc.

Even given lunar materials etc, if we are incapable of altering our current industrial trajectory from the top down (lack of political will), what on earth makes one think we could direct any space activities from the top down? It's currently sufficient for human leadership to favor selfish and group-harming goals, and there is no indication that this would change in orbit, lol

One currently sees the opposite of top-down coordination of space activities, after an initial cold-war-inspired display of bravado etc. (private ventures contracted to life public sector payloads into orbit) and you can be assured that plenty of both consumption of earths resources and pollution of earths atmosphere and water occur as byproducts. Private enterprise would seem to offer a "willy nilly" approach to anything, as such.

> Even given lunar materials etc, if we are incapable of altering our current industrial trajectory from the top down (lack of political will), what on earth makes one think we could direct any space activities from the top down?

I don't think the lack of a dictator--especially the sort of dictator you would support--is one of our problems!

What is astounding to me, both in O'Neills plan and Bezos offerings (and Silicon Valley Solutions in general, LOL) is the level of social and historical ignorance on display, as if we don't currently contend for control of resources, as if we are currently managing anything responsibly, and as if the political and social implications of such a project are occurring in the literal vacuum of space, rather than in the highly politically charged landscape of human endeavors.

These folks appear to avoid current events like the plague. Jeff Bezos is still highly involved in assisting the US government and it's various military and intelligence entities in seeking advantage versus other nations.

Taking nationalist ignorant policies and mentalities with us into space seems... retrograde, stupid, and doomed to failure. Inelegant.

There is a reason that all seriously futuristic sci-fi puts us WELL beyond this petty nationalist nonsense currently causing people to re-re-visit the 1980's yet again...

"we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc."

Only for very, very particular definitions of "Earth". There are numerous events in Earth's past that by any objective standard are more destructive than even the worst possible interpretations of man's efforts to date and worst plausible projections of man's efforts in the future. To pick one that probably doesn't even come to your mind, nothing we've done is even within two factors of magnitude of the disaster of the Great Oxygenation Crisis. Probably three, maybe even four. That one was bad. Well, bad at the time, anyhow; certainly none of us would today prefer that it had never happened.

That we're doing various dangerous and bad things is undeniable. That we're "DESTROYING" the Earth is a memetic weapon that has been crafted and fired at you by people who want you to give them lots of power to fix the DESTRUCTION of Earth, and to ensure that you stay in their control by ensure that anyone who disagrees with that assessment has the human instinctual "religious heretic" template applied to them, so you don't apply rational thought. Things are bad, but not so bad that you need that much despair.

That said, I don't expect us to lift industry into space. I expect us to lift an industrial seed into space that grows there, and that ultimately not all that many people will necessarily leave Earth.

I also expect that the current situation will not persist indefinitely. If we have clean energy, and look at how that is developing lately, lifting things into space isn't necessarily that big a deal. A "environmentally neutral" launch platform isn't even remotely inconceivable; it's not terribly out of reach today. The question isn't about the technology of 2019; the question is about the technology of 2069.

> There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people.

I think it is likely (20% or greater) we will compete for resources against non-terrestrial lifeforms before humans leave the solar system, assuming we leave the solar system.

Earth doesn't contain the majority of all water in the solar system. Earth might not even contain all of the liquid water in the solar system. What are the chances that liquid water exists in Ceres' core, or under the icey surface of Europa or Ganymede or another moon? What are the chances that Martian ice, or Europa ice, or Saturn's ice have microbes frozen in them, possibly able to thaw given better environmental conditions? We might even find life in places without water, such as Titan's methane lakes. Titan has a methane cycle very similar to Earth's water cycle. Methane makes a great rocket fuel. Water makes great rocket fuel and is necessary to life support systems.

We have a history of taking what we want without regards to the consequences or whom it hurts. If we don't compete with other life when we leave Earth it's because other life isn't out there, not because of our strong morale core.

Why go to the bottom of a gravity well to mine ice?

We'll probably (50% or greater chance) want all the water we can get our hands on. Water makes great rocket fuel and is a critical component of life support systems. Water, having mass, tends to collect in gravity wells.

Right, but those gravity wells might make that water rather irritating to get to relative to water contained in comets or other Oort Cloud objects.

Oort Cloud objects as in [0]? Getting to asteroids takes way to long already. Yeah, Oort cloud won't happen unless we have a magical breakthrough in propulsion as depicted in The Expanse. And at that point current intuition around gravity wells will probably not apply anymore as well.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes...

Ceres is about 2.5AU from the sun, has more water than Earth and the mass of 0.00015 Earths. The ort cloud is 1,000-100,000 AU away.

I am making the assumption that we will have a much stronger preference for water closer to Earth, and we aren't talking about large gravity wells.

There's a massive practical difference between Ceres size gravity wells that can be escaped with a half-decent cannon and ones that can't. And I've never heard of people suggesting there might be life on/in Ceres.

"I think it is likely (20% or greater) we will compete for resources against non-terrestrial lifeforms before humans leave the solar system, assuming we leave the solar system."

If you want to believe that, fine, but be aware you're believing despite a complete lack of evidence. There's little more than a faint trace of a sign of any life in the rest of the solar system (a few stray whiffs of methane on Mars that aren't that hard to explain geologically), and absolutely no sign of any sort of life that would provide any sort of competition if we decided we wanted their resources.

I don't mean that it would be a fair competition. I meant competition in the same way we compete for fresh water with plants. If there isn't enough to go around we always drink first. My 20% is entirely based on what I think the odds are that single cell microbes exist, possibly in a dormant state, somewhere near a water or methane source in our solar system.

>There's no story of "ecosystem damage" where there is no ecosystem in the first place.

There's also no story of humanity where there is no ecosystem in the first place.

I think the hazard isn't in stomping on an exo-Earth ecosystem.

I think it's that if we can't avoid damage to multi-billion year evolved, robust ecosystems on our home planet, we might not successfully craft off-planet ecosystems that will sustain us indefinitely.

Even Earth's ecosystem is as much "crafted" by human hands as it is "natural" in the first place, and that's been the case for millennia. It's not merely a question of "avoiding damage". It's a question of how we deliberately choose to craft the Earth's ecosystem in the future.

Just because the natural system has tolerated meddling and abuse does not amount to crafting. In fact the exercises of trying to create an artificial system failed miserably... and will likely again. And that's a great reason to try to go to space, to learn about how incompetent we are with our tech despite being full of ourselves by taking all the things provided freely by the earth for us to abuse and exploit while giving back virtually nothing. I mean humans often don't bury their dead naturally they burn them or embalm them... we give back nothing, we take everything: THIS IS SPARTA!

The “natural system” has tolerated millennia of “meddling and abuse”, and that “meddling and abuse” has largely served to make the ecosystem more habitable to humanity. We don’t even know what an un-“meddled” nature would even be like. Even the Amazon rainforest is in large part a product of human cultivation starting 11,000 years ago. The transformation of aurochs from a wild megafauna to a technology to transform inedible grass into edible milk and beef is also over 10,000 years old. The artificial evolution of our hunting and working companion, the dog, is millennia older still.

It's telling a millennia is 1,000 years. 10,000 years is a blink of an eye. The dinosaurs were around for over 160 million years, that is sixteen thousand times longer -- talk about a millennia. More habitable for humanity, deadly for pretty much every other living thing. Heck we were even doing all that much until 300 year ago -- that's 160 million divided by 533,333. So let's see the damage we did in 300 years multiplied by 533,333 times, yeah we're going the way of the dinosaurs almost half a million times faster than the dinosaurs.

We need maybe like 100 million or less people total on the planet. And 7 or 70 or heck 700 billion littered through the rest of the solar system. The chances of the survival of our species and life in general on the planet the would be infinitely greater than what we have done in the past 300 years. Population growth outside the planet raises absolutely no questions about the survival of the planet or species. The rest of the solar system is already completely and utterly dead as far as we know. No arguments about pollution or stability or sustainability or survival apply to it.

The rest of the universe as far as we know is our canvas, but please spare the damn planet from where we came. It's rare and nearly impossible to replace.

"tolerated" nothing like we've thrown at it in exponentially increasing form every year since 1900... and by all accounts it's not "tolerating" it very well at the moment. Fisheries? Sea water contamination? Air pollution? Groundwater contamination (fracking? agricultural runoff?) Rainforest loss (The Amazon! how many hectares lost per day? Palm oil plantations supplanting Indonesian rainforest, etc...) all on top of human caused climate change...

1) We have been around less than 1 million years. Our industrial revolution began less than 300 years ago. We constitute 0.01% of earths biomass, yet have destroyed 83% of wild mammalian life https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 We have polluted the oceans to the extent that plastic bags and radioactive fallout from WW2 can be found in the bottom of the Marianas trench. We are in a mad rush to burn the accumulated carbon reserves from millions of years inside of a span of decades. We are currently on a trajector to turn this planet into a place inhospitable to most life forms, including ourselves. https://xkcd.com/1732/ Last year was the highest carbon-output year on record, just as the year before was, and the year before that one.

We are utterly destroying the only known home to life forms in the universe. We are doing it rapidly.

You seem to be living in a delusional parallel reality in which establishing a space society doesn't consume the resources of our ONLY current home planet and doesn't pollute it.

We must change our ideologies, our thought patterns, our cultures, and our entire industrial societies patterns and habits (not to mention energy source) within the next decades to survive, let alone thrive or develop further.

I don't get the sense that you comprehend our actual condition on this planet. There is a very very steep footprint curve with regards to both our population (There was roughly 1.5 billion of us the last time we all tried to kill each other, World War 2. Now there are 7 billion of us. Before, the consumption footprint of a person was rather low, now each person consumes more resources than ever before, and this amount of consumption continues to rise. The Chinese middle class will surely want every accessory their American counterparts have, right?)

How has this entire predicament avoided your scrutiny until now?

I'm not denying that problems exist. But I'm also not going to resort to pessimistic doomsaying about them, either. Most of the problems you mention are already being solved.

If anyone's living in a delusional parallel reality, it's you and your apocalyptic rantings.

Actually talking about the Amazon as a great feat of human stewardship is perfect. Humans are capable of making nature better, but I sense one major caveat: when you name the Amazon as a human endeavor you forget that all the species that make the Amazon such a biodiverse place were already there. Humans might have made the Amazon a better place, but alle the ingrediënts were already there. The timescale of humans transforming earth is mindbogglingly short in terms of the timescale of "nature". Nowadays we are destroying species by the millions (not millions of individuals of a species, but millions of species!) This destroys the possibility to create a better system because the capital for creating one is destroyed.

>we might not successfully craft off-planet ecosystems that will sustain us indefinitely.

Not on the first go. So we should start early.

I think that learning how to craft off-planet ecosystems is a large part of what is going to help us stem damage down here. Where would solar power be now without the early adopters in the space industry?

"I think it's that if we can't avoid damage to multi-billion year evolved, robust ecosystems on our home planet, we might not successfully craft off-planet ecosystems that will sustain us indefinitely."

And so...?

Even if true, that doesn't lead anywhere. If you're trying to faintly imply we shouldn't try, you ought to bring the arguments up to the surface, where examination will quite likely show they don't have that much substance.

If only there was a large spinning habitat in space with a livable environment that our species could use...

If only there was a large spinning habitat in space where the megarich could use their money to create a paradise for its inhabitants...

Kenneth Ewart Boulding would like to have a word with you...

On an orbital colony, there are life maintaining systems and it's probable that people will have different ideas how much they would require maintenance.

Likewise, there will be limited resources and probably again people will have different ideas on what to spend on the short term. Ie a kid would like ice cream but the parents know they could starve before the next harvest so better to spend that energy on some more efficient food.

What about realistic optimism ?

I firmly believe in space colonization, but I also firmly believe in realizing things, not just pushing propaganda or fantasy (sometimes with ulterior motives). O'Neill cylinders as a panacea are just that, as far as I can tell (I admit I haven't seen any objective analysis on it; my total guess calculation would put it at say $20M/person absolute minimum for a large city of say 1M persons -- which would be several times the US economy or the assets of a large number of most valuable companies combined).

We just can't not fix Earth. There's no alternative. I've studied quite a bit about Mars colonization (and have my own thoughts about colonizing other places -- in particular I find underground habitats in Mercury intriguing), and it is quite clearly a project for the end of the century at least. Even when the soil, the gravity, and the materials are all more or less at your disposal, it's still extremely difficult to kick start a quasi-self-sustaining manufacturing base, even less one capable of producing exports and growing rapidly. The cost constants per inhabitant are very high.

Like anyone else, I think we need to move off this planet as soon as feasible. But we need a real vision, and we need to do it in a way that makes us truly more resillient and further reaching -- that is, we need colonies to be self-sustaining to the point of surviving catastrophe on other colonies without themselves disappearing -- this is the truly worthwhile goal I believe we need to pursue.

Imaginary space cities relying thousands of billionaires / millions of millionaires spending all wealth on are not that.

Heck, I even believe in Interstellar colonization in the not-too-distant future.

See also, other strategies for ensuring human survival:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17646897

(Underground habitats on Earth)

Not sure why you’re downvoted but I don’t think Bezos’ sentiment is to give up on earth.

Maybe optimism is out of date on average, but there are quite a few folks (including myself), who are very optimistic about the future.

Me too. But I'm not optimistic about the optimism of others.

We have 8 billion humans, humans don't need saving as much as the 1 environment we have needs saving.

"The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles...hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet...the planet...the planet isn't going anywhere. WE ARE!"

- George Carlin

Should we then stop worrying about child predators, terrorism, property theft and rape because in the big picture we will all be dead soon anyway?

We probably still have a few thousand years left. We're not going extinct tomorrow.

What a ridiculous suggestion. Of course we shouldn't, because those things affect us in the present.

The destruction of the environment affects us at the present too

> It's easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of Capitalism.

— Frederic Jameson

Every species has the biological imperative. Each species has the right to compete with all other species for environmental resources with all of their evolutionary advantages in order to survive.

It isn't humanity's fault that it can expand into and create its own environment suitable for propagating into. We shouldn't allow ourselves to perish into extinction if we have any other option. There is no more moral grounds for the intentional mass-murder of the human species than there is for the intentional destruction of any other species.

If people have tried humanity and are actually advocating its demise, I'd have to ask upon what grounds humanity had been found more wanting than plants or any other species known to have caused mass extinctions throughout known history. If humanity deserves to die, I think we should offer to allow the most ardent of species mass-suicide to go first.

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